The Ideal Realized: Practical Instructions From Neville Goddard

By Mitch Horowitz

How to Move Mountains

The extraordinary mystic Neville Goddard (1905-1972) is one of today's most influential metaphysical voices—and spiritual writer Mitch Horowitz is widely acknowledged as the leading interpreter of the teacher's ideas and life story. Now, in an unparalleled effort, Mitch combs through Neville's extensive body of work to distill the master's most practical and effective methods and techniques for operating the creative powers of your mind.

The Ideal Realized helps you vault past difficulties in using Neville’s work, particularly in the all-important area of entering the “feeling state” of your wish fulfilled. Mitch selects and highlights key passages that supply hands-on methods from Neville himself. This collection also includes key passages on dream interpretation, analysis of numbers and symbols, the use of objects for meditation, and the uses and misuses of speech.

Mitch’s introduction, “The Triumph of Imagination,” identifies and addresses some of the challenges you might experience on the creative-mind path; supplies fresh techniques; and suggests works to read hand-in-hand with Neville. Mitch’s afterword, “Chariot of Fire,” which is the first-ever transcript of his earliest talk on Neville, provides the full background of the ideas and history from which Neville emerged.

This anthology also features the first print version of one of Neville’s final lectures, “Even the Wicked,” delivered shortly before the teacher’s death in 1972; the complete text of his classic Prayer: The Art of Believing from 1945; and many valuable and overlooked works, including radio, record, and television lectures. The collection is capped with a timeline of Neville’s life and a selection of his most powerful aphorisms.

The Ideal Realized is a wholly original volume that spans Neville’s career and helps you to speed past bumps and deepen your practical understanding of the master’s ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G&D Media
• Release date: Aug 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781722522643

Mitch Horowitz

A widely known voice of esoteric ideas, Mitch Horowitz is a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, lecturer-in-residence at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, and the PEN Award-winning author of books including Occult America; One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life; and The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality. Mitch introduces and edits G&D Media’s line of Condensed Classics and is the author of the Napoleon Hill Success Course series, including The Miracle of a Definite Chief Aim, The Power of the Master Mind, and Secrets of Self-Mastery. Visit him at MitchHorowitz.com. Mitch resides in New York.

Book preview

THE IDEAL REALIZED

THE IDEAL REALIZED

Practical Instructions from Neville Goddard

EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY MITCH HOROWITZ

Published 2020 by Gildan Media LLC

aka G&D Media

www.GandDmedia.com

Introduction, Notes, and Afterword, copyright © 2020 by Mitch Horowitz

No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. No liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained within. Although every precaution has been taken, the author and publisher assume no liability for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

First Edition: 2020

Front cover design by David Rheinhardt of Pyrographx

Interior design by Meghan Day Healey of Story Horse, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

eISBN: 978-1-7225-2264-3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Triumph of Imagination

By Mitch Horowitz

CHAPTER 1

Man Has Placed too Little Value on Himself

From At Your Command, 1939

CHAPTER 2

The Secret of Feeling

From Freedom for All, 1942

CHAPTER 3

Sleep

From Feeling Is the Secret, 1944

CHAPTER 4

Prayer: The Art of Believing

1945

CHAPTER 5

Remaining Faithful to an Idea

From Five Lessons, 1948

CHAPTER 6

Desire Is the Mainspring of Action

From Five Lessons, 1948

CHAPTER 7

Feed the Mind with Premises

From Five Lessons, 1948

CHAPTER 8

No One to Change But Self

From Out of This World, 1949

CHAPTER 9

Law of Assumption

Radio lecture, KECA, Los Angeles, July 1951

CHAPTER 10

Failure

From The Power of the Awareness, 1952

CHAPTER 11

Prayer Is a Surrender

Radio lecture, KECA, Los Angeles, July 1953

CHAPTER 12

Sound Investments

Lecture, 1953

CHAPTER 13

The Pruning Shears of Revision

From Awakened Imagination, 1954

CHAPTER 14

All Things Are Possible to the Inner Man

Television talk, KTTV, Los Angeles, CA, 1955

CHAPTER 15

Inner Conversations

Lecture, 1955

CHAPTER 16

The Secret of Imagining

From vinyl record, Neville, 1960

CHAPTER 17

Election and Change of Consciousness

Lecture, February 24, 1963

CHAPTER 18

The World of Caesar

Lecture, October 23, 1967

CHAPTER 19

It Will Not be Late

Lecture, March 15, 1968

CHAPTER 20

Remembering When

Lecture, October 6, 1969

CHAPTER 21

Even the Wicked

Lecture, May 5, 1972

AFTERWORD

Chariot of Fire: The Ideas of Neville Goddard

Lecture by Mitch Horowitz, June 28, 2013

Ideals Realized:

Aphorisms by Neville

Prophet In His Own Country:

A Neville Goddard Timeline

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

INTRODUCTION

The Triumph of Imagination

By Mitch Horowitz

"The inner journey must never be without direction."

—Neville, Awakened Imagination, 1954

It is my hope that you will find this a wholly original kind of anthology of Neville Goddard’s works. Although collections of Neville’s lectures and books abound, this one is designed with a special purpose. The Ideal Realized distills specific passages from Neville’s work that are focused on concrete methods. The aim of this book is to provide you with a reference source for the full range of techniques that the teacher offered across his career, and thus help you to exercise the powers of your mind more fully and quickly.

In that vein, I have curated references from early in Neville’s literary career in 1939 to just before the teacher’s death in 1972. One of his final lectures that year, Even the Wicked, concludes the anthology portion of this book. I provide dates and, where possible, locales of his talks. In some cases, I abridge or excerpt passages from longer works in order to focus on a specific technique. Abridged passages are indicated by ellipses (…). The bibliographical material allows you to locate the fuller source if you wish. I also italicize key lines and paragraphs to highlight specific applications.

My afterword, Chariot of Fire, reproduces for the first time my earliest talk on Neville in June 2013. It offers further ideas about optimizing his methods, highlights some of my personal efforts, and provides the broader historical background of Neville’s ideas and techniques. I think you will find it a useful companion to the writings in this volume. The book is finally rounded out with a timeline of Neville’s life and a selection of his aphorisms.

Occult philosopher Israel Regardie (1907–1985) encountered Neville in New York City in 1946 and wrote glowingly about him in his book The Romance of Metaphysics. Regardie greatly admired Neville but, for the all of the promise he saw in Neville’s methods and for all the gravity he detected in Neville as an individual, Regardie also believed that Neville, at least at that stage of his career, had done too little to provide his audience with training and technique. The writer believed that Neville’s injunction to enter the feeling state of your wish fulfilled—the lever of his system—was offered with too little practical instruction, at least for the everyday person. Regardie felt that Neville, as a former actor, dancer, and stage performer, might find it easier than most people to enter and remain in an emotive state. It is worth considering Regardie’s perspective in full:

Whether the average person can do this is another matter. Certainly some people can do it. Neville, I am sure, can do it. But he is an artist, a dancer. He has been enabled by his training, by his life’s discipline, to assume a definite role. He can adopt a certain part, acting it out as though it were true. His is the ability and capacity to achieve identification with mental images, with a personality other than his own—that is an intrinsic part of his emotional make-up. That is why such states of consciousness are open and available to him—as naturally they are to similarly trained and similarly constituted people.

But John Doe is not, I am afraid, capable of such unrestrained flights of feeling and imagination. His mind has become entirely too prosaic, his feelings too inhibited, his imagination entirely too restrained for such flights into the empyrean. I do not say that in the last analysis that such feats are impossible to the average person. But I do insist that training is necessary—training in the art of letting go, in the discipline of feeling, and in the analysis of psychological states. This takes such time and effort that there are few willing to embark upon a way of life that implies the expenditure of much time and labor. But if they do not wish to do so, then such states of consciousness and such spiritual achievements must remain mere dreams, fantasies, visions of another world completely beyond their reach.

Though my sympathies are largely with Neville both as to many of his conceptions and technical procedures—yet I feel that several factors are absent from his method. He is absolutely correct in placing emphasis on feeling. By means of this intensity of feeling, all things become possible.

But the problem is to provoke such an intensity, a storm, a madness of emotion by means of which a communion with the unconscious self may be established. This certainly has not been adequately dealt with. Moreover, Neville advises relaxation. One must relax to the point of floating, and losing awareness of one’s body. But how shall we achieve such deep relaxation? This is not easy for most of us. What instruction does Neville give?

"You take your attention away from your problem and place it upon your being. You say silently but feelingly, ‘I AM.’ Simply feel that you are faceless and formless and continue doing so until you feel yourself floating.

‘Floating’ is a psychological state which completely denies the physical. Through practice, in relaxation and willingly refusing to react to sensory impressions, it is found to develop a state of consciousness of pure receptivity.

I feel inclined to wager large odds that most who hear him or any other teacher of metaphysics, have not the least notion as to how to relax. There is nothing metaphysical in relaxation. By following a few simple rules which operate in accordance with known physiological and psychological laws, a deep state of freedom from neuro-muscular tension can be induced …

Moreover and far more important—what shall we do about developing this intensity of feeling? Merely to relax will not do it. One can relax, lose complete consciousness of the body, float beautifully away from awareness of sense and mind—and still be as cold-blooded as a fish. Neville’s method is sound enough. But the difficulty is that few people are able to muster up this emotional exaltation or this intellectual concentration which are the royal approaches to the citadel of the Unconscious. As a result of this definite lack of training or technique, the mind wanders all over the place, and a thousand and one things totally unrelated to I AM are ever before their attention.

I believe that the ancients had superior methods. Confronted by the same problems, and by the same lack of training, they evolved methods which have stood the test of time. To some people they prescribed a long course of psychological training, having as its logical objective the development of a tremendous power of mental concentration. This training we have come to know as Yoga. To others not temperamentally capable of this, or unwilling to engage upon such a discipline, arduous to the extreme, they worked out other methods.

Anything that will tend to exalt the mind and feelings, is useful. Music, color, poetry, perfumes—anything that will intoxicate the mind and senses within certain limits, is utilisable …

When I wrote my first article about Neville in early 2005, I quoted Regardie’s critique to a colleague. He waved it off saying that the occult philosopher didn’t get it. I urge no side-stepping of Regardie’s criticism. His wording and emphases are not my own, but he raises important points, asking whether the everyday person is capable of the relaxation required to enter a sustained feeling state, which is the royal road to mental causation in Neville’s method. Perhaps things have grown easier in this regard since Regardie’s era, as many of us are now schooled in meditative and mindfulness techniques. But I am still haunted by his points.

The Ideal Realized focuses on methods, most of them from Neville’s own teachings, to aid in that relaxation. Many of these methods involve visualizing while in a near-sleep state, which sleep researchers today call hypnagogia. You experience this state naturally twice a day: just as you are drifting off at night and again as you are waking in the morning. During this stage between sleep and wakefulness, you experience dreamlike imagery and yet retain conscious awareness. It is a uniquely supple and suggestible frame of mind. Serious psychical researchers have found that hypnagogia is a heightened period for statistically recorded episodes of ESP phenomena. (I write further about this in The Miracle Club and One Simple Idea.) Neville had an early instinct for the uses of hypnagogia.

*  *  *

In another pillar of Neville’s system—one that raises further questions of technique—change is said to occur not only from your assumptions about yourself but also about others. In his 1945 work Prayer: The Art of Believing (which is reproduced in full this collection), Neville writes: To change the world, you must first change your conception of it. To change a man, you must change your conception of him. You must believe him to be the man you want him to be and mentally talk to him as though he were.

But what if you encounter a situation where, try as you might, you cannot change your conception of another person, perhaps someone who torments you? Sometimes people wrestle with forgiveness and re-conceptions of another person for years without results. I do not blame anyone for this, as unfinished emotional business can trenchantly linger, and sometimes for sound reasons. If you find yourself in such a predicament, are the doors of mental reconstruction closed to you? I believe they are not. To say that the doors of mental causation are closed would only serve to replicate the binary qualities of sin and salvation that many people who follow Neville’s way of thought fled from in the religions of their childhood.

Rather, I believe that you should trust your own intellect and maturity by entering into an ameliorative mental state that you believe reflects the highest current resolution of the situation for you. Perhaps you cannot enter into a feeling state of beneficence toward a tormentor. But you may be able to enter into a feeling state of distance. Or, frankly, of self-defense. There may be instances where that is called for. Moreover, perhaps it is all that you can summon at a given point. Allow this. You must adopt a state that is emotionally persuasive to you, even if it is incremental. Use the tools that you have—do not feel bound by the imperative to view another in just one way.

Some people who love Neville’s work may find this heterodox. It is not. Neville himself states in the lecture Law of Assumption in this volume: Each man must find the means best suited to his nature to control his attention and concentrate it on the desired state. To this I would add, concentrate on the best possible desired state.

On a related note, I am frequently asked about how to structure affirmations. My response is always: there is no wrong way. Again, the vital element is emotional persuasiveness. We enact what we believe. Even if you feel compelled to frame your affirmation in future-tense, for example, or to condition it in some other way, I advise not struggling with that.

Your life and search are your own—and myriad responses, sometimes based on different needs, contingencies, or intervals of time, are wholly necessary. I believe that self-trust is an inherent part of mental causation. Respond to your needs. Frame your needs in ways that feel most natural for now. If your course must be indirect, allow that. If your course later alters, allow that too.

You may also find that an indirect path leads exactly where you need to go.

Another method by which to enter the desired state of mental creativity is the construction or re-construction of the inner story that you frame around yourself. The manner in which you view yourself—your ideals, your values, your persona, your purpose—is a vital source of power. As I was approaching this topic, I received a mysteriously well-timed letter from a reader in Utah. He framed exactly what I was after. With my correspondent’s permission, his letter and my reply appear below:

Dear Mitch,

First of all, thank you so much for the work you’re doing. I came across Neville when I was about 20 years old and his work shattered my reality in the best way possible. It’s amazing to see someone like yourself that is dedicating his life to sharing his ideas, among others, with the world.

Second, I have a question that I would appreciate your input on. I’ll try to make it as brief as possible.

When most hear the phrase, Your thoughts create your reality I feel like most are immediately directed to the everyday chatter that is going on between their ears. From there, they spend their time trying to forcefully stop the flow of thoughts. That’s how it was for me. However, I’m beginning to understand that statement from a much deeper perspective and would love your opinion on it.

Is it not so much that the chatter creates our reality but more so the story we tell ourselves that creates our reality? Our story being our interpretation, true or false, regarding circumstances and our relationship to them.

For instance, a child may grow up thinking that they are ugly because one day in 6th grade, they decided to wear a new haircut. Later that day, they got bullied. They make the assumption that they’re ugly and that’s why they were bullied. When in reality, the bully is getting abused at home and is just simply taking it out on the kid. It could have been anyone.

Whether real or not, the victim interpreted it as such and has grown up thinking they are ugly. Now they are 46 years old and still think they’re ugly and that expresses itself through failing relationships, lack of confidence, etc.

Not really sure how to connect the dots here and turn it into a practical means of creating a new and better reality. I guess that’s what I’m hoping you can assist me with.

Appreciate any response to this.

Thank you Mitch.

Truman Mylin

Salt Lake City, UT

Hello Truman,

Your observation is remarkably well timed as I am writing about this issue right now.

It occurs to me that so much depends on what story we find emotionally persuasive about ourselves. How do you see yourself archetypally? That informs what to strive for as well as your belief in your ability to attain it. For example, as I just wrote someone, if you leave corporate America you may lose your health insurance. But maybe that’s okay? These are the kinds of issues one can address more broadly in devising a new self-picture. We are so persuaded of what we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot attain, that we sometimes resist mental images of a richer, fuller life, however defined.

I believe it is possible to bypass conditioned resistance by reframing your sense of story. To pick up on your example, we see this occur all the time in the lives of people who may actually look rather ordinary in certain settings or clothing but who take on truly extraordinary new dimensions when they reconceive of themselves through fashion (a field I believe that the spiritual culture does not fully appreciate), adoption of new physical traits and tones, bodily adornment, and so forth. It is the outer telling of a new self-story. It is profoundly effective.

Personally speaking, I identify with rebels, from Henry David Thoreau to Joe Strummer. That identification can make it difficult for me to think in terms of accumulating money. Intellectually I want money—it has natural uses and fills vital needs—but I suspect that something in my self-story is in conflict with it. What if I can reframe that story so that I do not throw away the archetypes of rebellion but I somehow revise them to better encompass money? Norman Mailer was a rebel who wrote bestselling books. Steve Jobs was a rebel who upended digital culture. These are offhanded examples of how a revised self-story can help us enter the feeling state that is the royal road to mental causation.

I hope this is useful.

Thanks and best,

-Mitch-

If you want to gain a better understanding of Neville ideas about feeling states and effortlessness, I advise making a parallel reading of the work of someone whom Neville never directly mentions but whose ideas and phrasing appear in in his early work: French mind theorist Emile Coué (1857–1926).

Coué is famous for the mantra: Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better. But the mind theorist’s career covered more than that. Coué was one of the earliest figures in modern life who understood the psychological impact of self-image, assumption, and imagination. A better summation of Coué’s career than his famous mantra might be: Imagination is destiny.

An idea of Coué’s that figured into Neville’s thought—you can find this language in Prayer: The Art of Believing—is that each of us contains two competing forces: will and imagination. The will is your self-determinative and decision-making ability. Imagination consists of the mental pictures, conditioned responses, and assumptions that govern you, particularly with regard to self-image and emotional judgments about others. Coué said that when will and imagination clash, imagination invariably wins. Assumptions and conditioning almost always overcome intellect. As Neville put it in Prayer: When belief and will are in conflict, belief invariably wins.

In a 1953 lecture reprinted in this collection as Prayer Is a Surrender, Neville describes the need for an exquisitely gentle redirecting of your psyche: The sovereign rule is to make no effort, and if this is observed, you will intuitively fall into the right attitude. This echoes Coué from his 1922 book Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion: The sovereign rule is to make no effort, and if this is observed, you will intuitively fall into the right attitude.

There are many divergences in the two men’s ideas, but from a parallel reading of Coué—whose work offers vibrant insights of its own—you will begin to glean a fuller idea of the importance of effortless effort. In short, Coué believed that you could recondition yourself from within a mild hypnotic state (he was trained as hypnotist); Coué wrote that this is actually what is occurring